Inquiring Minds

Questions About Physics

You Wrote:

I'm doing a paper on quarks and I'm investigating the discovery of top
quark. I have a question on the matter. When you talk about of "jets" of
particles, what are you meaning? Lots of particles? Probably is an idiomatic
problem because english it is not my mother tongue. Thank you.

When two particles for example a proton and an antiproton collide at
high energies many particles are produced.

For example the top quark can be produced from an antiquark and a quark
colliding. The top quark cannot exist on its own for very long it decays
into a W boson and a b quark. The W boson decays further into quarks or
leptons. Individual quarks don't exist very long by themselves due to
conservation of color. They must combine with other quarks to become
color neutral. This combination produces mesons (particle made of two
quarks) or hadrons (particle made with three quarks), these particles
decay through various decay modes producing a flood of particles that
are read out as jets in our detectoror. If you look at a display of an event this energy radiates outward like
jets.